On almost any street in the United States or Canada, on the night of October 31, there are lit pumpkins on the steps, scarecrows on the porches, cotton cobwebs in the windows, and knots of kids in costume going door to door with a pillowcase in hand. It all looks as old as the continent. And yet that night, the way we know it, is only a little over a hundred years old.
Halloween arrived in North America in the nineteenth century with Irish and Scottish families who crossed the Atlantic, and here it was rebuilt one layer at a time. The pumpkin replaced the turnip. Early twentieth-century postcards fixed the witches and black cats in place. Trick-or-treating took hold in the 1920s and 1930s, and the phrase itself was first printed in Canada. And only a few decades ago, a Mexican layer was added: the skull. This is how it was put together, piece by piece.
What did Irish and Scottish families bring with them?
Games, pranks and a bit of magic. In Ireland, Scotland and Wales, Halloween night had been tied for centuries to fairies, mischief and, above all, fortune-telling about love.
The most famous witness is a poem. In 1785 the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote “Halloween,” published the following year. It describes a night in the countryside when young people play games to find out whom they’ll marry. In one, you pulled a kale plant from the garden and looked at the stalk: if it came up straight, your future spouse would be tall and strong; if it came up crooked, less so. In another, you set nuts by the fire, each one named for someone, and watched how they behaved as they roasted. And the poem opens with fairies dancing on the hills that night.
Then came the crossing. Between 1845 and 1852, the Great Famine drove hundreds of thousands of people out of Ireland, most of them to the United States and many to British North America, today’s Canada. According to the folklorist Lisa Gabbert, they brought with them the pranks and mischief of that night and the rounds from house to house asking for something.
Was there anything here before?
There was autumn, harvest and ghost stories. And one book that brings them all together.
Around 1820, Washington Irving published The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In it, a schoolmaster named Ichabod Crane walks past fields where ears of corn peek out from their leafy coverts and, below, yellow pumpkins lie turning their bellies to the sun, “giving ample prospects of the most luxurious of pies.” He arrives at a farmhouse party with apple, peach and pumpkin pies, and by the end of the night the guests are telling ghost stories.
That same night, Ichabod meets the dreaded Headless Horseman. The next morning all anyone finds by the brook is his hat and, close beside it, a shattered pumpkin. The reader gets the joke: his rival had dressed up as the rider and thrown a pumpkin at him.
The story doesn’t take place on Halloween, but it already has nearly everything: corn, pumpkins, apples, pranks and ghosts. When the Irish holiday arrived, it found the stage already set.
When did the pumpkin get a face?
In the mid-nineteenth century. In Ireland and Scotland people carved turnips; in North America pumpkins were bigger and easier to hollow out, and the turnip was left behind.
By February 1852 the carved pumpkin was already in literature: in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Feathertop”, a witch cuts “two holes for the eyes and a slit for the mouth” in a pumpkin to make a scarecrow’s head.
The story of the lantern is in the legend of the jack-o’-lantern, the scarecrow has an article of its own, and the pumpkin, which comes from Mexico, is in where pumpkins come from.
What did postcards have to do with it?
They gave Halloween its face. Between 1900 and 1920 the United States went through the “golden age” of the postcard, and Halloween had its own.
The historian Adrienne Darrah explains how it happened:
- In 1898 Congress allowed postcards printed by private companies to be mailed at the same cheap one-cent rate.
- By 1909 more than a billion postcards were being sold in the United States a year. Many of the prettiest were printed in Germany.
- That same year a tariff made German postcards more expensive, and around 1910 the craze began to fade.
In those twenty years, Halloween postcards filled up with witches, black cats, pumpkins, moons and love-divination games: apples, mirrors, couples peering into the future. The people who bought and mailed them most were women of the new middle class. And so what used to vary from one town to the next became a single picture shared by the whole country. If you’ve ever bought a “vintage Halloween” print, you’ve bought that picture.
And the party games?
They came out of fortune-telling. Bobbing for apples floating in a tub of water, hanging apple peels to see who walks under them, setting nuts by the fire: all of them were love-divination games that came over from Britain and Ireland and turned into party games. In the early twentieth century, Halloween parties at home, with costumes and games, became fashionable.
More than a hundred years later, bobbing for apples is still one of the night’s favorite games.
When did trick-or-treating start?
In the 1920s and 1930s, and it became the custom of the whole continent after the Second World War.
Before that, the night was known for pranks: gates taken off their hinges, wagons hoisted onto roofs, windows soaped. Trick-or-treating brought some order to that night. Instead of random mischief, kids in costume went from house to house, and anyone who handed over a treat was spared the trick.
The words appear first in Canada. The Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, from the University of British Columbia, finds them in Ontario in 1917, as “tricks or treats” in Sault Ste. Marie and “treat or trick” in Owen Sound. The exact phrase turns up in 1927, in a report from Blackie, Alberta: kids at the back door and the front “demanding edible plunder by the word ‘trick or treat.’” From there it spread south and west until it was simply what Halloween sounded like.
Its distant relatives are the rounds of Britain and Ireland: souling, asking for food in exchange for praying for the souls of the dead, and guising, going from house to house in disguise. The step from those to trick-or-treating hasn’t been documented in a straight line; the family resemblance has.
In the 1970s another layer appeared: the fear of razor blades and poison in Halloween candy. The historian Nicholas Rogers devotes a whole chapter to it and studies it as a collective panic. It left behind a habit that’s still alive: checking the candy when you get home.
And the Mexican skull?
It’s the most recent layer, and its dates are fairly clear. According to the researcher Regina Marchi:
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Before the 1970s | In the United States, sugar skulls, pan de muerto and the altars of southern Mexico were practically unknown |
| Early 1970s | In Los Angeles and San Francisco, Chicano artists organize the first public Day of the Dead celebrations, with sugar-skull workshops and altar exhibitions. The skull becomes a symbol of Chicano identity |
| 2000s | Day of the Dead imagery reaches mass media: TV series, films, magazines |
| 2010s | Skulls and the Catrina show up in Halloween-store costumes, phone cases and beer cans, and the debate over cultural appropriation begins |
| 2013 | Disney tries to trademark “Día de los Muertos” and withdraws after public backlash |
| 2017 | Coco is released |
So the skull has been in the United States for half a century, and mixed in with Halloween for about fifteen years. Sugar skulls and La Catrina have histories of their own, which began in Mexico long before. And how the two holidays sit side by side is in Halloween vs. Day of the Dead.
The history of Halloween in North America, in one table
| Layer | When | From where |
|---|---|---|
| Love divination, fairies and pranks | Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries | Scotland and Ireland (Burns, 1785) |
| Autumn, harvest and ghost stories | Around 1820 | United States (Irving) |
| The great Irish migration | 1845–1852 | Ireland, to the United States and Canada |
| The pumpkin instead of the turnip | Mid-nineteenth century | North America, with a plant from Mexico |
| Witches, black cats and pumpkins on postcards | 1900–1920 | Printers in the United States and Germany |
| The scarecrow as an autumn figure | From 1900 | Seasonal decorations in the United States |
| Costume parties and games | Early twentieth century | United States and Canada |
| Trick-or-treating | 1920s–1930s; the whole continent after 1945 | The phrase: Ontario 1917, Alberta 1927 |
| The Mexican skull | Chicano since the 1970s; part of Halloween since the 2010s | Mexico, by way of the Chicano movement |
Questions
Is Halloween an American holiday? The way it’s celebrated today, yes: it was assembled in the United States and Canada between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its name and date are much older and come from the Christian eve of All Saints in Britain and Ireland. That’s the subject of where Halloween came from.
Is Halloween in Canada the same as in the United States? Almost layer for layer, since both countries received the same immigrants and the same customs. Canadians often keep the older spelling, Hallowe’en, and the earliest printed “trick or treat” is Canadian.
When did Halloween reach Mexico? In the north, many decades ago; in the rest of the country it became visible mainly in the 1990s. How it relates to the Day of the Dead is in this article.
Sources
- Lisa Gabbert, “Divination Games and the Romantic Halloween Postcard,” Ritsumeikan Bungaku 683, 2023, pp. 291–306. Open-access PDF.
- Adrienne Darrah, “May fortune’s lantern burn serene: An analysis of golden age Halloween postcards as middle-class promotional culture,” Journal of American Culture 47, no. 3, 2024, pp. 218–230. doi:10.1111/jacc.13580 (open access).
- Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, 1819–1820. Text on Project Gutenberg.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Feathertop: A Moralized Legend,” The International Magazine, February and March 1852. Text on Project Gutenberg.
- Nicholas Rogers, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Tad Tuleja, “Trick or Treat: Pre-Texts and Contexts,” in Jack Santino (ed.), Halloween and Other Festivals of Death and Life, University of Tennessee Press, 1994, pp. 82–102.
- “Trick or treat,” DCHP-3: Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, University of British Columbia. Entry.
- Regina Marchi, “U.S. Day of the Dead: Fusing Spanish, Indigenous and U.S. Cultures to Communicate New Messages,” Camino Real 3, no. 5, 2011, pp. 103–125. Open-access PDF, Instituto Franklin (UAH). Dates in the table, pp. 109–114.
- Colin Gunckel, “Charles and Ray Eames’s Day of the Dead (1957)…,” in Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, Duke University Press, 2019, pp. 136–156. doi:10.1515/9781478090090-010 (open access).
- Orquidea Morales, “Horror and Death: Rethinking Coco‘s Border Politics,” Film Quarterly 73, no. 4, 2020, pp. 41–49. doi:10.1525/fq.2020.73.4.41
Written by the Idunn Editorial Team, with support from AI tools in the research and drafting.
Leave a Reply